Watch Snob On Vintage Vs. New

Should You Invest In Vintage Or New? The Watch Snob Weighs In

The watch industry may run on the sale of new watches, but in recent years it has been vintage watches, and vintage watch collecting, that has been generating many of the headlines. Things came to a head last year when Phillips auctioned off the infamous Paul Newman Daytona, which as you have almost certainly heard (it was impossible to be a watch enthusiast and not hear about it) went for a bit over seventeen million dollars.

One of the most common, if not the most common questions that those of you who read this column seem to have, is whether or not one should buy a vintage or a modern watch. Let us assume at the outset that the person asking is interested, not in investing or building up a focused collection, but rather, in obtaining a watch that can be worn on a regular basis and which can be used under a variety of circumstances.

First of all, one must dispose immediately of the delusion that a vintage watch is a good investment; with very few exceptions, the days when it was possible to buy a vintage wristwatch and sell it a few years later for dramatically more than you paid for it, are long gone. The most collectible watches from Rolex and Patek Philippe are simply no longer possible for the average collector to buy, and what one obtains when one buys watches like unusual or rare Daytonas, or Patek perpetual calendars, has often more to do with bragging rights than with intrinsic horological quality.

Secondly, one must also relinquish the idea that vintage watches represent better quality. Modern wristwatches, especially from companies that invest heavily in materials improvements and research and development, such as Rolex and Omega, are so much better technically than their ancestors of twenty years ago that there is simply no comparison. Better materials, better manufacturing processes, and improvements in many aspects of design mean that modern watches as a general rule are more durable and more accurate.

However, there are also many, many examples of modern watches that are very poor value for the money.

The single biggest argument against buying a new watch, is that over the last fifteen years prices for Swiss watches have risen to a truly obscene degree. There are very few brands that have resisted the impulse to keep raising prices, some of which have gone up by several hundred per cent, while manufacturing costs have remained essentially flat. This means that watches which were defensible as luxuries a decade ago, are now simply insults to one’s intelligence (at least from a price standpoint). I love Lange, Vacheron and Patek as much as the next fellow, but when a simple, time-only Calatrava is a forty thousand dollar watch, something is seriously amiss. You can’t really blame a watch company for wanting to make money – they are not charities, but businesses which often have shareholders to appease – but it is very poor long range planning to create a glut of rushed-to-market, often badly thought through designs that no one can afford even if they wanted to buy them.

The advantage, therefore, would seem to be with vintage watches but here a great trap lurks for the unwary: service. There is simply no ducking it: if you wish to wear your vintage watch on a regular basis, with a reasonable expectation of accuracy and little things like water resistance, it is almost certainly going to need a service. Vintage watch sellers generally offer little in the way of recourse should a vintage watch begin to give trouble. This is not out of venality (though there are many venal vintage watch dealers, some very prominent, who think nothing of doing things like swapping dials on vintage Submariners in order to create high value Frankenwatches) so much as it is out of necessity; servicing vintage watches before selling them would be prohibitively expensive in what is already a fairly low-margin business.

Can you “wear it until something goes wrong?” Certainly. You can also drive your automobile until it breaks down; both are terrible ideas and for the same reason. A watch with damaged parts that require replacement is an expensive and very time-consuming object, especially as good independent watchmakers are much rarer than they used to be and reasonably expect to be compensated well for their time and skill – assuming they can even find parts, which is by no means guaranteed.

Here we see why modern brands which are popular, are popular. Rolex, for instance: they are expensive, but many are still under ten thousand dollars and while that is still a lot of money, you are at least getting an extraordinarily well-made watch which will hold its value to boot. Grand Seiko is another example: at about half the cost of a Rolex you can get a watch just as well made in many respects, and while the value retention isn’t quite what you get from Rolex, the price of entry is not nearly so steep either.

Now, this is not to say that one should never buy a vintage watch; in general good watches were intended to give good service, if reasonably cared for, for many decades but one should be aware that there is a high probability of finding oneself in possession of a fixer-upper, and plan accordingly. And if you are a tyro steer clear of vintage Rolex; it is a minefield – there are without a doubt more fake Paul Newman Daytonas out there than real ones, with some of the fakes residing in very expensive and extensive collections.